Yappy Days

Bernadette Duncan spent twenty-six years as a radio talk show producer. In Yappy Days: Behind the Scenes with Newsers, Schmoozers, Boozers and Losers, she vividly recounts her adventures in the trenches of big-time talk radio during its most dynamic decades set against the dramatically changing backdrop of America's pre- and post-9/11 realities. This candidly told story includes Bernadette's firsthand impressions of the sometimes quirky celebrity talk show hosts whom she served as a producer during her career. In talk radio, a producer does a wide variety of tasks in facilitating a show, including booking the guests, screening the listener phone calls, occasionally engineering the program, and most important, holding the hands, supporting, consoling, encouraging, and simply trying to get along with some of the most egotistical, egocentric, neurotic, insecure, demanding, opinionated, sometimes horrible, but oftentimes wonderful and always remarkably talented human beings to talk across the face of the earth. They include some of the biggest in the business: Larry King, Sally Jessy Raphael, Gil Gross, Tom Snyder, Lou Dobbs, Charles Osgood, and more. Bernadette also collected a number of insightful anecdotes interacting with hundreds of high-profile guests during those caffeine-charged years, from media, show business, and politics-many as quirky, ego-driven, and neurotic as her talk show host bosses. Yappy Days: Behind the Scenes with Newsers, Schmoozers, Boozers and Losers is a fun, breezy, informative, and gently analytical look at the media, journalism, and the complex nature of ego.